The Battles of Coronel and Falkland Islands and other archive films at the London Film Festival

Meticulous: a scene from the Battle of Coronel off the coast of Chile in 1914 (Pic: BFI) BFI

No London Film Festival would be complete without the unveiling of a major treasure from the BFI National Archive. And, on the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War, what more appropriate than a powerful yet almost unknown 1927 film recreating two of its decisive naval battles.

A newly restored print of the film, The Battles of Coronel and Falkland Islands, will screen in the Queen Elizabeth Hall on the South Bank, with a specially commissioned score by Simon Dobson, performed live by the Band of the Royal Marines.

“It’s about two quite significant naval battles in October 1915,” says Bryony Dixon, curator of silent film at the BFI National Archive. “You’ve got these two great navies head-to-head, with the German East Asian Squadron in the Pacific harrying British ships wherever they found them.”

The director, Walter Summers, had made a number of war “re-enactment” films — about Mons, Ypres, the Somme, Zeebrugge — says Dixon, “but this was his most ambitious. Before, he’d been confined to doing things with model shots and reconstructed scenes but, in this one, he basically went to the Admiralty and said, ‘Can I borrow your fleet?’ And they said, ‘Sure’. So what he does is shoot the whole thing at sea.”

Most of the action sequences were shot off Plymouth. And, with the Falklands being too far away, the scenes set there were shot on the Isles of Scilly, with St Mary’s standing in for Port Stanley. Here, Summers allowed himself a bit of comic relief at the expense of the island volunteers — a sequence that got him into hot water with the Governor of the Falklands.

“But,” says Dixon, “the bit that I think is remarkable is the scene in the middle between the two battles where they refit the ships — a five-to-seven-minute montage which is absolutely magnificent. Summers is a really interesting director, one of the best of his style and era. He’s not well known but will be after this.”

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